Today's road warrior has an ever-growing arsenal of tools to choose from. We now have Smart Phones such as those from Palm, Apple and Blackberry that allow us to do virtually all our everyday desktop functions in miniature. For those who want a more expansive yet compact workspace, we have the Netbook. These little wonders allow us to carry around all of our standard daily applications in a form factor that weighs a couple of pounds and can operate from anywhere from 2 to 6 hours. So now, the ever-harried businessperson can put his presentation together, load it on his Netbook or Smart Phone, tweak it to perfection while sitting on the train and show up at the clients completely prepared for his presentation. Except...
We haven't reviewed voice dictation software for several years. The last version of Dragon Naturally Speaking that we looked at was probably somewhere around version 6. Nuance, the company that acquired the Dragon software system, has recently released version 10 of the Dragon Naturally Speaking Professional series. It was received with great anticipation. We eagerly installed it on a test system, after which I sat there quietly thinking to myself, "what am I going to say about this product?" And that's when it hit me. 'Saying' is what it's all about with speech recognition software.
This minor epiphany led me to decide that I would give it the same test an average user would give it. I would ignore most of the instructions while maintaining high expectations for success. I installed it and immediately started dictating. To say the least, I was astounded. Accuracy was over 95% out-of-the-box. And to be completely honest, I did a few things that aren't necessarily recommended out-of-the-box.
One of my associates spent hours writing a paper and sent it to me to proofread. I read the document and jotted down my ideas, typed in some comments, a little cut here, a little paste there, a whole bunch of deletions with research references, and then, in a moment that can only be described as distracted creativity (?), promptly saved it overwriting the original file. Yikes!
That’s when the “Oh No You Didn’t!” rang out through the office.
Fortuitously, I had printed out the original document. Even more fortunately, our office had been sent a copy of PDF Converter Professional 6.0 from Nuance Communications for review.
We all know that today's business world is more connected and more mobile than ever before. New technology and form factors are being introduced every day. Recently, we got to test theTreo™ Pro Smartphone, a very capable new offering from Palm.
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